🇹🇩 🇫🇷 | French military officers and trainers have returned to Chad, 14 months after the Central African country tore up its defense pact with its former colonial ruler and ordered its soldiers out, according to reporting and analysis by the Institute for Security Studies. French personnel have been on the ground since April, the ISS said, providing training, intelligence and limited air support to Chadian forces. No new treaty has been signed. No ceremony marked the return. Neither Paris nor N'Djamena has publicly confirmed the arrangement, and France maintains no permanent base in the country. Chad ended its defense cooperation agreement with France in November 2024, giving Paris weeks to withdraw. About 1,000 French troops had left by the end of January 2025, closing a military presence that had run without interruption since independence in 1960. President Mahamat Idriss Deby Itno hailed the departure at the time as "a new sunrise for a fully sovereign Chad" — language that placed N'Djamena alongside Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, which had each pushed out French forces in the preceding two years. The renewed cooperation includes French intelligence on what the ISS describes as "politico-military groups" — the term used in Chad for armed opposition to the government. The arrangement has taken shape during a sustained squeeze on Deby's opponents. In May, the Supreme Court dissolved the country's main opposition coalition and jailed eight of its leaders. They were pardoned this month.